One of the most powerful examples I've encountered is Trout in the Classroom (read my article describing students in Brooklyn and the trout fingerling they called Godzilla).
Just because the morning starts earlier in China, so he will go into the classroom, read the material, see the discussion question and post his own original contribution to the discussion.
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist's classroom read Shel Silverstein's "Giving Tree," about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended.
Furthermore, why should the students benefit more from time in the classroom reading balance sheets if their professors teach better after more time in the "messy, fast-moving world" outside academia?
Nevertheless, Dr. Lyon's agency is distributing guides to hundreds of thousands of educators across the country that offer sweeping endorsements of systematic phonics as "a valuable and essential part of a successful classroom reading program".
There will be sessions and workshops on successful and practical classroom reading for pleasure strategies, poetry and engaging students with a diverse range of authors and texts from the English and Media Centre, The National Literacy Trust, teachers, librarians and educationalists.
Free legal clinics allow law-school professors and students to do good for the needy, keep such neediness fresh in their mind, and practise making judgment calls about tough decisions qualities not taught, supposedly, to MBA students sitting placidly in their classroom reading case studies about Bain Capital.
I think it must have been some nascent sense that a story with such a perfect central conceit - 90-odd puppies held in a stately home awaiting the day their pelts are worth taking for coats while the dogs of Britain unite to help their parents cross England to find them - could never truly be killed that I took my copy home when (40 billion years later) we finished our classroom reading.
Christian Zsilavetz stood in front of the classroom reading the school's handwritten guidelines from a spiral notebook to his eight students, ages 8 to 17.
